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blind business flatulence...

Vested interests have an even tighter grip on Australia’s political and economic life now than at the height of the mining tax debate, retiring Labor MP Wayne Swan has warned.

He said the situation had worsened since he wrote an incendiary 2012 essay for The Monthly, which railed against the “poison of vested interests” and set off a bruising public war between the then-treasurer and mining magnates Gina Rinehart, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest and Clive Palmer.

Mr Swan’s warning comes amid an increasingly fierce political debate over the Turnbull government’s plans to lower the corporate tax rate to 25 per cent, and as corporate leaders including the Business Council, Lachlan Murdoch, Mr Forrest, Kerry Stokes and Anthony Pratt jet off with Malcolm Turnbull to make the case for Australia to follow the Trump administration by slashing business taxes.

Mr Swan, who will bow out of politics at the next election, said those arguing for a reduction in the corporate rate – which this month also included the heads of Qantas and BHP – were blinded by their own wealth.

“Twiggy and the other corporate leaders who are advocating this corporate tax cut are just suffering from a blindness of affluence,” Mr Swan told The New Daily in an interview in his parliamentary office.

He said they were unable to “understand why there is such public revulsion at their continuing advocacy, putting their self-interest ahead of the national interest”.

Concerned fellow citizens asked me if Pope Pius XI’s statement of 15 May 1931, in the encyclica “Quadragesimo Anno – On the Social Order, Par. 106,” is still relevant, and I can only answer, as I will explain below, that this pope’s wake-up call and his exhortations in the middle of the “world economic crisis” were almost providential, because the big capital owners’ financial stranglehold was secured during the Second World War and above all by the “international financial order” institutionalised after the Second World War and further developed later.

Pius XI stated:

“This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.”

Heinrich Wohlmeyer was born in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, in 1936. He studied in Vienna, London and the US. He is an Austrian industrial and research manager as well as a regional developer and was active in industrial and regional development for over 20 years. He was one of the first to initiate sustainable concepts and created the Austrian Union of Agricultural and Nutritional Scientific Research and the Austrian Society for Biotechnology.

A public servant turned whistleblower employed by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has this morning had his home raided by officers from the ATO and the Australian Federal Police, after speaking with reporters in a major joint Four Corners and Fairfax investigation into alleged abuse of power by the ATO.

Adelaide-based Richard Boyle, who has worked at the ATO as a debt collector since 2005, told the ABC his rental unit in suburban Edwardstown was raided this morning by a team of four AFP officers accompanied by an ATO investigator.

"This is an astonishing use of public resources, to investigate someone who has passionately and with every fibre of my being tried to assist taxpayers in meeting their tax obligations and to enforce taxpayers who are ripping the country off by not paying their fair share of tax," he said.